The Missing Measures of Copy Testing

Abstract

Most copy-testing methods rely heavily upon verbal playback from people who have been exposed to the copy of interest. While this procedure undoubtedly provides much information of use in assessing the effects of exposure, it is biased in the direction of logical cognitive content. Often underrepresented or omitted from playback responses are nonverbal elements such as music, paralanguage, casting, setting, and facial expressions. Yet such factors can play a critical role in areas such as persuasion, recall, and liking.This article summarizes eight years of research on nonverbal factors in television commercials, the first two of which were previously reported in the August/September 1984 issue of the Journal of Advertising Research (Vol. 24, No. 4). It is found that a content analysis of major nonverbal elements contained in a sample of approximately 200 commercials, even without interviews to obtain consumer responses, allows reasonably good brand-by-brand predictions of rank-order copy-test performance on criterion measures such as persuasion and brand salience. This in turn allows effective screening and elimination of sub-par commercials even before consumer research is undertaken.